I believe the most effective marketing slogan in history was “Vaccines are safe and effective.” This is because it implies 100% safety and 100% efficacy (which is impossible regardless of the therapy) but simultaneously avoids explicitly committing to that claim. Thus, the product is zealously promoted by its supporters but simultaneously escapes accountability for its continual failures (as no concrete promise is ever broken each time the vaccine is shown to be unsafe or ineffective).

Story at a Glance:

•The vaccine industry has been largely shielded from scrutiny because of the belief “vaccines are safe and effective.” As a result, there is very little discussion of how vaccines are made, or the merits of each approach. Here, I will review some of the foundational principles of vaccine design and the clinical implications of those designs that I believe are critical to understanding their efficacy.

•For example, hot lots (poorly produced dangerous batches i.e. “toxic medicine”) are an inevitable consequence of the production methods used for many types of vaccines, and over the years there have been dozens (if not more) of disasters that have been covered up, but nonetheless frequently led to many vaccines being withdrawn from the market (refer below report that lists over 60 of these). If the potential of hot lots emerging had been known by the medical field, physicians in practice likely would have been able to recognize when hot vaccine lots were being released onto the market and the tsunami of deaths they caused could have been averted.

•Likewise, the principles of vaccine design are also critical for parents trying to decide which immunizations are appropriate or inappropriate for their children to receive (as the relative risks of each type vary immensely).

Finally, I will cover what I believe to be the safest and most effective approaches to vaccination that have been developed. These include relatively unknown and affordable approaches that perform better than vaccination (both for halting epidemics spreading through a country or to protect individual children from common childhood illnesses) and which ones can be used to therapeutically treat a variety of debilitating chronic illnesses (e.g., Lyme disease, chronic fatigue, rheumatoid arthritis alongside a variety of other immunologic or allergic conditions).

Of note, as more and more new investigations of the vaccine program emerged around the globe, Stanley Plotkin, who many consider to be the father of vaccinology, made a startling admission:

Post-authorization studies are needed to fully characterize the safety profile of a new vaccine, since prelicensure clinical trials have limited sample sizes, follow up durations, and population heterogeneity.

Which dispels another one of the common lies we hear—that vaccines are the most rigorously tested products on the market (something I would argue is irreconcilable).